RE: arrogance

[<Daniel_Hall -at- trendmicro -dot- com>]

Good points, Bruce.

Let me point out again (to the list in general) that I am mainly talking about wording suggestions from poor writers. 

This by no means excludes the possibility that there's something unclear about what I wrote (as Bruce suggests) and it _is_ an indicator that the text in question needs to be revisited. Any time someone has a question or suggestion (engineers, marketing... anybody)  that's an indicator that all _may_ not be right. I know that sometimes I'm going too fast (heck, I wrote 200 help topics in the last two weeks) to catch everything or be deliberate enough in my writing. 

I'm always willing to listen to what anyone has to say. If the suggestion has merit, it doesn't matter where it comes from. However, I rarely find that the _exact_ wording suggested by the engineers makes things clearer - though that may be a function of the developers here being (mostly) ESL writers. As someone else wrote earlier, it's often significantly worse. ;-)

I also 100% agree that more reviews are better. I'm always looking for that extra pair of eyes to comb the docs for things that I'll have missed. Getting both the outside perspective and the chance to catch errata I've overlooked is very welcome. (And as Bruce says, focused reviews, where the reviewer has guidelines for what to look for are best.) 

Dan

-----Original Message-----
From: Bruce Byfield [mailto:bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 9:04 AM
To: Daniel Hall (HIE-US)
Cc: TECHWR-L
Subject: RE: arrogance


Quoting Daniel_Hall -at- trendmicro -dot- com:

> Having a developer suggest _wording_ changes (again, not for correctness)
> makes no sense. Especially when the developer is a poor writer. 

If non-writers make the mistake of thinking that anyone can do it, writers 
often make the mistake of thinking that nobody else can do it. Both these ideas 
are half-truths, so far as I can see. On the one hand, technical writing does 
require certain skills. However, on the other hand, these skills are not 
especially rare, and a reasonable number of people have some of them.

Even a poor writer can give useful feedback, especially if you give him or her 
some guidelines. Sometimes, getting any sort of feedback is useful, simply 
because it gives you another perspective.

> While they don't mind
> interacting with others on the team to share the information they have, they
> don't like these other team members telling them how to write code. No?

A good team of programmers often discuss the best way to write code.

I suspect some of the problem with technical writers is that often they work 
alone, either because the company doesn't have another writer, or because they 
have well-defined responsibilites. Programmers, I think, are more used to the 
idea that their source code will be modified by someone else.

-- 
Bruce Byfield bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com 604-421.7177

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